The question whether our conscious personality survives after death has been answered by almost all races of men in the affirmative..

The temple of the sylvan goddess, indeed, has vanished, and the King of the Wood no longer stands sentinel over the Golden Bough..

The world cannot live at the level of its great men..

If mankind had always been logical and wise, history would not be a long chronicle of folly and crime..

In point of fact magicians appear to have often developed into chiefs and kings..

The second principle of magic: things which have once been in contact with each other continue to act on each other at a distance after the physical ….

Dwellers by the sea cannot fail to be impressed by the sight of its ceaseless ebb and flow, and are apt, on the principles of that rude philosophy of….

For when a nation becomes civilized, if it does not drop human sacrifices altogether, it at least selects as victims only such wretches as would be p….

By religion, then, I understand a propitiation or conciliation of powers superior to man which are believed to direct and control the course of natur….

In primitive society, where uniformity of occupation is the rule, and the distribution of the community into various classes of workers has hardly be….

In course of time the slow advance of knowledge, which has dispelled so many cherished illusions, convinced at least the more thoughtful portion of m….

With the advance of knowledge, therefore, prayer and sacrifice assume the leading place in religious ritual; and magic; which once ranked with them a….

For extending its sway, partly by force of arms, partly by the voluntary submission of weaker tribes, the community soon acquires wealth and slaves, ….

The custom of burning a beneficent god is too foreign to later modes of thought to escape misinterpretation..

The advance of knowledge is an infinite progression towards a goal that ever recedes..

The scapegoat upon whom the sins of the people are periodically laid, may also be a human being..

Yet it would be unfair to the generality of our kind to ascribe to their intellectual and moral weakness the gradual divergence of Buddhism and Chris….

It is a common rule with primitive people not to waken a sleeper, because his soul is away and might not have time to get back..

The natives of British Columbia live largely upon the fish which abound in their seas and rivers. If the fish do not come in due season, and the Indi….

The consideration of human suffering is not one which enters into the calculations of primitive man..

The old notion that the savage is the freest of mankind is the reverse of the truth. He is a slave, not indeed to a visible master, but to the past, ….